Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © 2014 by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin

English language translation copyright © 2018 by Shelley Frisch

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York, for permission to reprint from “Babi Yar” from The Collected Poems, 1952–1990 by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, edited by Albert C. Todd with Yevgeny Yevtushenko and James Ragan, © 1991 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., New York.

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover photograph © Eugene Shimalsky

Katja Petrowskaja asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008245283

Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780008245306

Version: 2018-01-02

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue: Thank Google

1: AN EXEMPLARY STORY

Family Tree

Negative Numbers

The List

The Recipe

Perpetual Motion

Neighbors

In the Museum

2: ROSA AND THE MUTE CHILDREN

Shimon the Hearer

A Flight

The Gate

Ariadne’s Thread

The Last Mother

Magen David

Divining Rod

The Train

Facebook 1940

3: MY BEAUTIFUL POLAND

Polsha

Ozjel’s Asylum

Ulica Ciepła

Two Cities

Family Heritage

eBay Now

The Rehearsal

Nike

The Wrong House

Kozyra

Life Records

Related Through Adam

Kalisz

Lost Letters

4: IN THE WORLD OF UNSTRUCTURED MATTER

House Search

Van der Lubbe

The Sword of Damocles

Delusions of Grandeur

In the Archive

Voices

Goethe’s Secret Service

A Meshuggeneh

The Trial

Three Cars

Random Chance

Maria’s Tears

The Apron

Instinct for Self-Preservation

Forget Herostratus

Gorgon Medusa

Karl Versus Judas

Wind Rose

5: BABI YAR

A Walk

Riva, Rita, Margarita

Anna and Lyolya

Lucky Arnold

Maybe Esther

6: DEDUSHKA

Grandfather’s Silence

Lunch Break in Mauthausen

The Garden

Friday Letters

Pearls

At Grandfather’s

Milky Way

Russian Cemetery

Hans

Trip to Mauthausen

Sisyphus

The Death March of the Unknown Relatives

The End of the Empire

Epilogue: Intersections

Acknowledgments

Illustration Credits

About the Translator

About the Author

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE
THANK GOOGLE

I would rather have set off from elsewhere than here, the wasteland around the train station that still attests to the devastation of this city, a city that was bombed and reduced to ruins in the course of victorious battles, as retribution, it seemed to me, seeing as how the war that had been the cause of immeasurable devastation, far and wide, had been steered from this very city, an endless blitzkrieg with iron wheels and iron wings. That is now so far in the past that this city has become one of the most peaceful cities in the world and pursues this peace almost aggressively, as if in remembrance of the war.

The train station was recently built in the middle of this city, and despite the much-touted peace the station was inhospitable, as though it embodied all the losses that no train could outrun, one of the most inhospitable places in our Europe, united every which way, yet still sharply bounded, a place that always feels drafty and where your gaze opens out onto a wasteland, unable to alight in an urban jungle, to rest on something before moving out of here, out of this void in the midst of the city, a void that no government can fill, no lavish buildings, no good intentions.

Again, it was drafty as I stood on the platform and my eyes once more swept across the huge letters

BOMBARDIER

Willkommen in Berlin

underneath the arc of the curved roof, noting the contours lackadaisically yet thrown as ever by the mercilessness of this welcome. It was drafty when an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked about this Bombardier.

Your thoughts go straight to bombs, he said, to artillery, to that terrible, unfathomable war, and why Berlin of all places should be welcoming us in that way, this lovely, peaceful, bombed-out city, which is aware of all that, it just can’t be that Berlin bombards—so to speak—new arrivals like him with this word in huge letters, and what is meant by welcome anyway, who exactly is supposed to be bombarded, and with what. He was desperately seeking an explanation, he told me, because he was about to set off. I replied, somewhat astounded that my inner voice was addressing me in the form of an old man with dark eyes and an American accent, breathless and ever more agitated, almost wildly plying me with questions that I myself had played through a hundred times already, play it again, I thought, sinking deeper and deeper into these questions, into this distant realm of questions on the platform, and I replied that I, too, think of war right away, it’s not a matter of age, I always think about the war as it is, especially here in this through station, which is not the final destination for anyone, never fear, you can keep on going, I thought, and that he was not the first who had wondered about that, to himself and to me. I am here too often, I thought for a second, maybe I’m a стрелочник, a shunter, the shunter is always the one to blame, but only in Russian, I thought, as the old man said, My name is Samuel, Sam.

And then I told him that Bombardier is a French musical now having a successful run in Berlin, many people come to the city to see it, can you imagine, all because of Bombardier, the Paris Commune or some such piece of history, nowadays two nights in a hotel plus musical all-inclusive, and that there already had been problems since, at this station, Bombardier is advertised only with this one word, without comment, it had even been in the newspaper, I said, I recall, that it claimed the word gave rise to false associations, there was even a court case that grew out of the city’s dispute with the musical, linguists were called in, imagine that, to assess the potential of this word to incite violence, and the court delivered the verdict in favor of the freedom of advertising. I believed what I was saying more and more although I had no idea what this Bombardier on the arc of the central station meant and where it came from, but as I was speaking so enthusiastically and offhandedly and saying things I would certainly not define as a lie, my imagination took wing, and I drifted further and further without the slightest fear of going over the cliff, coiling and recoiling into the curves of this verdict that had never been pronounced, because those who don’t lie can’t fly.

Where are you traveling to? the old man asked me, and I told him everything without a second of hesitation, with the kind of verve I might use to excoriate some other musical, I talked about the Polish city my relatives had moved from a hundred years earlier, to Warsaw and then farther east, perhaps solely in order to bequeath to me the Russian language, which I was now so generously passing along to no one, dead end and halt, so I have to travel there, I said, to one of the oldest cities in Poland, where they, the forebears about whom nothing is known, had lived for two, three, or even four centuries, perhaps since the fifteenth century, when the Jews in this little Polish town had been granted privileges and become neighbors, the Others. And you? Sam asked, and I said I am Jewish, more by accident than design.

We’re waiting for that train as well, Sam said after a brief pause, we, too, are taking the Warszawa Express. Taking this train, which looks like a thoroughbred horse as it looms up out of the fog, an express train that moves according to schedule but against time, into the zone of Bombardier, for us only, I thought, and the old man moved on to say that his wife was looking for the same thing, namely the world of her grandmother, who had come to the United States from a small White Russian village outside of Biała Podlaska, and yet it was neither his homeland nor his wife’s, a hundred years have gone by and many generations, and none of them knew the language anymore either, but still, Biała Podlaska sounded to him like a forgotten lullaby, godknowswhy, a key to the heart, he said, and the village is called Janów Podlaski, and hardly anyone had lived there besides Jews and now only the others, and they were both going there to take a look at it, and, he really did keep saying and again and again, as though he was stumbling over an impediment, naturally nothing remained there, he said naturally and nothing in order to emphasize the senselessness of his journey, I, too, often say naturally or even innately as though this disappearance or this nothingness was natural or even self-evident. The landscape, however, the names of the places and a stud farm for Arabian horses that has been in existence since the early nineteenth century, established after the Napoleonic Wars and the top choice of the experts, everything was still there, they told me as though they had googled everything. A horse could cost a good million dollars there, Mick Jagger had already taken a look at horses from this stud farm at an auction, his drummer bought three, and now they would be going there, five kilometers from the Belarussian border, thank Google. There was even a horse cemetery there, no, the Jewish cemetery was not preserved, that was on the Internet as well.

I’m a Jew from Tehran, the old man said in English as we were still standing on the platform, Samuel is my new name. I came to New York from Tehran, Sam said. He knew Aramaic, had learned a good many things, and took his violin wherever he went. In the United States, he’d actually set out to study nuclear physics, but wound up applying to the conservatory, failed the entrance exam, and became a banker, but was no longer in that line of work either. Even after fifty years, his wife said when we were already sitting in the train and the metallic rainbow of “Willkommen in Berlin” was no longer weighing down on our heads, his wife said that whether he’s playing Brahms, Vivaldi, or Bach, it all sounds Iranian. And he said it was fate that they had met me, I looked like the Iranian women of his childhood, he had wanted to say Iranian mothers, perhaps he even wanted to say like my mother but held back, and he added it was also a twist of fate that I was better versed in genealogy than they were, and that I was traveling to Poland with the same destination and the same train—assuming the urge to search for what has vanished can be defined as a destination at all, I replied. And no, it is not fate, I said, because Google watches over us like God, and when we search for something, it fleshes out our story, just like when you buy a printer on the Internet and you continue to be offered printers for a long time to come, and when you buy a backpack for school, you continue to get advertising for it for years, and let’s not even mention online dating, and if you google yourself, at some point even your namesakes vanish, and what remains is only you, as though you have sprained your foot and limp, and suddenly the entire city limps, out of solidarity, perhaps, millions of limpers, they form a group, almost the majority. How is democracy supposed to work if you get only what you’ve already searched for and if you are what you search, and you never feel alone or you always do, since you never get the chance to meet the others, who are not like you, and that’s how it is with the search, you come across like-minded people, God googles our paths, so that we stay put in our grooves, I always meet people who are looking for the same thing I am, I said, and that is why we, too, have met here, and the old man said, This is the very meaning of fate. He was obviously further along in exegesis than I.

All of a sudden I thought of the musical that had actually created a sensation here, when you saw the words Les Misérables, without comment, on the advertising spaces of the city, unlike the movie of the same name, which called the miserable ones Prisoners of Fate. The musical spoke to everyone with its Les Misérables, as though one needed constant consolation—Poor, miserable you!—or simply needed to have it pointed out that it is not merely one of us who is suffering, but indeed we all come together in suffering, because faced with these huge letters, faced with this wasteland in the middle of the city, all of us are miserable, not only the others, but I as well. And so the letters of Bombardier on the arc of the station roof fill us with their reverberation, the way organ music fills the church, and none can escape it.

And then I really did google it: Bombardier was one of the largest railway and airplane construction companies in the world, and this Bombardier, which sets our paths, had recently launched an ad campaign, “Bombardier YourCity.” Quickly and safely. And now we were traveling from Berlin to Poland on the Warszawa Express, with the blessing of Bombardier, among curtains and napkins bearing the insignia WARS, an abbreviation as outmoded and bygone as Star Wars and other wars of the future.

CHAPTER 1
AN EXEMPLARY STORY

FAMILY TREE

A spruce is standing lonely.

—HEINRICH HEINE

As a child I thought a family tree was something like a Christmas tree, a tree with decorations from old boxes—some baubles break, fragile as they are, some angels are ugly and sturdy and remain intact through every move. In any case, a Christmas tree was the only family tree we had, bought new every year then thrown away, a day before my birthday.

I had thought that telling the story of the few people who happened to be my relatives was all that was needed to conjure up the entire twentieth century. Some of my family members were born to pursue their callings in life in the unswerving, implicit belief that they would fix the world. Others seemed to have come out of nowhere; they did not put down roots, they ran back and forth, barely touching the ground, and hung in the air like a question, like a skydiver caught in a tree. My family had just about everything, I had arrogantly thought, a farmer, many teachers, a provocateur, a physicist, and a poet—and plenty of legends.

We had

a revolutionary who joined the Bolsheviks and changed his name in the underground to one we have been using legally for close to a hundred years

several workers in a shoe factory in Odessa, about whom nothing is known

a physicist who ran an experimental turbine factory in Kharkiv and vanished during the purges; his brother-in-law was told to turn against him in court because party loyalty was gauged by a person’s willingness to sacrifice his own family members

a war hero named Gertrud, the husband of my aunt Lida, who was born when work was declared an end in itself, at first everyone worked a lot, then too much, and later still more, because exemplary achievements replaced norms and work became the meaning of life in the nation of proletarians and supermen, and so it came about that my future uncle was named Geroy Truda at birth, hero of labor, work hero, abbreviated to Gertrud

then there were Arnold, Ozjel, Zygmunt, Misha, Maria, Maybe Esther, maybe a second Esther and Madam Siskind, a deaf-mute student of Ozjel who sewed clothing for the entire city

many teachers who founded orphanages throughout Europe and taught deaf-mute children

Anna and Lyolya, who died in Babi Yar, and all the others there

a phantom named Judas Stern, my great-uncle

a peacock my grandparents bought for the deaf-mute children so they could enjoy its beauty

a Rosa and a Margarita, my floral grandmas

Margarita received a letter of recommendation for party membership in 1923, directly from Molotov, the future Soviet minister of foreign affairs, that’s how we tell the story, as if it showed that we were always at the center of the action

my grandmother Rosa, who had the loveliest name of all speech therapists and waited for her husband longer than Penelope had

my grandfather Vasily, who went off to war and did not return to my grandmother Rosa for forty-one years. She never forgave him for his long odyssey, but—in our family there is always someone who says but—but, this someone said, they kissed, at the kiosk next to the subway station, when they were both over seventy, the Hotel Tourist was under construction just then, but Grandfather, my mother said, Grandfather wasn’t able to leave the apartment anymore back then, and the Hotel Tourist wasn’t built until later

my other grandfather, the revolutionary who had not only changed his name but also given his mother a new name in every Soviet questionnaire, depending on the way the political wind was blowing, his employment, and his taste in literature, until he came up with Anna Arkadyevna, that was Anna Karenina’s name, who thus became my great-grandmother

We were happy, and everything within me resisted Leo Tolstoy’s pronouncement that happy families are alike in their happiness and only the unhappy ones are unique, a pronouncement that lured us into a trap and brought out our penchant for unhappiness, as though only unhappiness was worth words, but happiness hollow.

NEGATIVE NUMBERS

My big brother taught me the negative numbers, he told me about black holes, as an introduction to a way of life. He conjured up a parallel universe where he was forever beyond reach, and I was left with the negative numbers. The only cousin I knew about was someone I rarely saw, even more rarely than her mother Lida, my mother’s big sister. My strict uncle, my father’s big brother, during his rare visits, gave me physics problems to solve on the topic of perpetual motion, as though constant motion could gloss over his absence in our lives. My two babushkas lived with us, but weren’t all there: I was still a child when they reached the full incapacity of their advanced age. Other babushkas baked piroshki and cake, knitted warm sweaters and colorful caps, some even socks—socks, the aerobatics of knitting, vysshiy pilotazh, as people used to say. They brought the children to school and to music class, they picked them up, and in the summer they waited in their gardens for their grandchildren, in their dachas, little country huts. My babushkas lived with us on the seventh floor, and could not put down roots in the concrete. Both of them had floral names, and I secretly thought that the mallows that grew in front of our fourteen-floor building were connivers in Babushka Rosa and Babushka Margarita’s plot to retreat into the plant kingdom.

They didn’t have all their marbles, you might say, though in Russian you don’t use the expression “all their marbles.” Russians would ask, Don’t you have them all at home? I was afraid of this question, although my babushkas were almost always at home, probably for my protection, even so, this not having them all at home, or even just the word “all,” alarmed me, as though the others were privy to something about us that I wasn’t, and knew who or what was actually missing.

Sometimes I thought I knew. Two of my grandparents were born in the nineteenth century, and it seemed to me that in the turmoil of the era one generation had been lost or skipped over, they truly were not “at home”; my friends’ great-grandparents were younger than my grandparents, and it was left to me to foot the bill for two generations and face the music. I was the very youngest in a line of the youngest. I was the youngest there had ever been.

The feeling of loss worked its way, without warning, into my otherwise cheerful world, hovering over me, spreading its wings, depriving me of air and light, on account of a deficiency that may not have existed. Sometimes it struck like a bolt of lightning, a sudden swoon, throwing me off balance and leaving me gasping for breath, flailing about to regain my equilibrium, hit by a bullet that was never fired off, no one had said hands up!

These existential gymnastics in the struggle for balance struck me as a part of the family heritage, an innate reflex. In English class we practiced hands up, to the sides, forward, down. I always figured that the word gymnastics came from the word hymn, as in hymnastics, in Russian both words start with a g, gimnastika and gimn, and I eagerly extended my hands upward in an attempt to touch the imperceptible sheath of the heavens.

There were many who had even fewer relatives than I. Some children had no brothers or sisters, no babushka or parents, and there were children who had sacrificed themselves for the homeland in the war, these children were brave heroes, they became our idols, they were always with us. We were not allowed to forget their names even at night, they had died many years before our birth, but back then we had no “back then,” only a “now,” in which war losses were said to constitute an inexhaustible supply of our own happiness, because the only reason we were alive, we were told, was that they had died for us, and we needed to be eternally grateful to them, for our peaceful normality and for absolutely everything. I grew up not in the cannibalistic but the vegetarian years, as Akhmatova dubbed them (and we all echoed her), and we attributed all losses to the war that was long since over, the war that bore no article or adjective, we simply said war; there aren’t any articles in Russian anyway, and we did not specify which war, because we thought that there was only one, erroneously, since during our happy childhood our state was waging another war, down in the faraway south, for our safety, we were told, and for the freedom of others, a war that we were not allowed to acknowledge in spite of the daily losses, and I, too, did not acknowledge it until I was ten years old and saw the zinc casket in front of our apartment building, which contained the remains of a nineteen-year-old neighbor, a boy I could not recall even then, but I recall his mother to this day.

I had no reason to suffer. Yet I did suffer, from early on, although I was happy and loved, and surrounded by friends, embarrassed to be suffering, but suffering still with a loneliness that ranged from razor-sharp to bleakly bitter and I thought it stemmed only from a feeling of missing out on something. The luxurious dream of a big family at a long table followed me with the persistence of a ritual.

And yet our living room was full of my father’s friends and my mother’s adult students, dozens of students who always stood by her until in time, there were several generations of them at our table, and we took the same photographs as other families: against the backdrop of the dark floral curtains lots of merry, slightly overexposed faces, all turned toward the camera, at a long, beautifully decorated table. I don’t know exactly when I first picked up on the hints of discord during my family’s loud, exuberant festivities.

You could count the list of those who could be considered part of my family on the fingers of two hands. I had no need to practice the piano scale of aunt, uncle, cousin, first cousin once removed and her husband, cousin, and great-uncle—up and down, up and down, and I was terrified of that piano, that aggressive totality of the keyboard.

In an earlier time, before we had our big dinner parties, a large family was a curse, because relatives could be members of the White Army, saboteurs, noblemen, kulaks, overeducated “enemies of the people” living abroad, their children, and other dubious characters, and everyone was under suspicion, so families suffered a convenient loss of memory, often in order to save themselves, even though it rarely helped, and on special occasions, any relatives who might fit these categories were generally forgotten, often hidden from the children, and families dwindled; whole branches of the family were erased from memory, extended families were pared down until there was nothing left of them but the joke about the two men with the same last name who are asked if they’re related. Certainly not, they reply: we don’t even have the same last name!

THE LIST

One day, the relatives from deep in my past were suddenly standing in front of me, murmuring their merry messages in familiar-sounding languages. Well then, I thought, I’ll have them make the family tree blossom, fill in the gaps, and mend the feeling of loss, but they crowded together in front of me without faces or histories, like fireflies of the past that shed light on small spaces around them, maybe a couple of streets or incidents, but not on themselves.

I knew their names. All these Levis—the name of my great-grandmother, her parents, and her siblings—would be scattered around the world if they were still alive. I knew that there were Gellers or Hellers; no one knows exactly which. I knew about a Simon Geller only from a note in Russian, a translation from a Hebrew newspaper that is no longer available anywhere. I knew the last Krzewins, the descendants of the Hellers, the relatives with the name that crunches like snow under your feet, like kovrizhka, gingerbread, between your teeth. There were also the Sterns, which was my grandfather’s name until he was twenty. My name would be Stern as well if the Russian Revolution hadn’t triumphed, and that was the name of his many brothers and sisters, his parents, and their many brothers and sisters, and his grandparents with their entire clan, if there were truly as many of them as I liked to imagine.

My distant relatives, Krzewins and Levis, had lived in Łódź, Kraków, Kalisz, Koło, Vienna, Warsaw, Kiev, and Paris, up to 1940, as I realized only recently, and in Lyon, my mother told me. Ruzija attended the university in Vienna, and Juzek studied in Paris, I recall my grandmother saying. I never learned who Ruzija and Juzek were; they were simply relatives of mine. Maybe it was the other way around: Ruzija studied in Paris and Juzek in Vienna. The word conservatory came up, but I don’t recall to whom it applied. And I recall being told that Ruzija and Juzek had to clean the sidewalk with a toothbrush. In Łódź, Kalisz, Warsaw, it was perhaps still vacation time, and at the conservatory the semester had not yet begun; they were at home and not in Paris or Vienna. When I heard this as a child, I thought their location was Switzerland, because our newspapers were reporting that in Switzerland everything was squeaky clean, and some people made a habit of squatting with little brushes and shampoo in front of their houses and scrubbing the sidewalk. I pictured the country drowning in soap bubbles, this country—or another—in its gleaming, unattainable spotlessness.

Some of my relatives’ names were so common that it made no sense to look for them. It would have been a search for people who happened to bear the same name, because in the lists they all appear together, next to one another like neighbors, intermingled, and mine cannot be distinguished from hundreds of others with the very same names, and anyway it would not have been possible for me to distinguish my family from strangers the way you separate wheat from chaff, seeing as it would have been a selection, and I didn’t want that, not even the word. The more of the same name there were, the less likely was the chance of finding my relatives among them, and the less likely this chance was, the clearer it became to me that I had to consider each person on the lists one of my own.

I painstakingly compiled their names, tracking down every Levi, Krzewin, Geller or Heller, and at some point, when I was standing in Warsaw’s military church facing the long lists that ran from wall to wall in tiny print, lists with the names of the dead from the Katyń massacre—why do we automatically look for our own names even in the lists of the dead?—I found Stanisław Geller on the lists and, in the chapel of the Katyń military church, I declared my affinity with all namesakes, including Stanisław, as though he and everyone I had yet to find also belonged to my family, all the Gellers and Hellers, and all the Krzewins and Sterns. Every Stern seemed like a secret relative, even those as remote as stars in the sky.

Years earlier, when I was in New York, I leafed through the yellow pages, the yellowed pages of an old phone book. Where are my grandfather’s brothers and sisters? Where are his father’s brothers and sisters, whose name was Stern and who had disappeared from Odessa in every direction? Were their descendants singing with the Velvet Underground? Did they have a bank? Were they teaching in Massachusetts, at MIT, or were they still working in a shoe factory? After all, somebody’s got to be working.

There were many Sterns in the phone book. Eight whole pages. Yellow-star Sterns in the yellowed phone book. Should I call up each one of them and ask? What did you do before 1917? Are you still waiting for the poor relatives from the east? Even after a hundred years? And the luminaries, should I include them on my list, or should they include me on theirs?

Who told me that one of our Levis was a bookkeeper in a button factory in Warsaw? Another Levi made the 501 jeans, the best ones I knew back when I began my search. He surely wasn’t one of us; I can’t imagine that someone in my family could have a yen for profit or any idea of how to seize opportunities that came along. As my thoughts continued to turn to the button factory in Warsaw or elsewhere, my conviction grew that no one who had remained in Poland could have made it onto a list like that.

I recalled a rescue list I’d seen in a movie, and I went through it as though it were possible that someone from my family could be recorded there and thus rescued, showing up on the Internet. I read one name after the other as though in search of winning numbers, as though I would have recognized someone.

There was no Levi or Krzewin, but I did find an Itzhak Stern, also a bookkeeper, though in a factory in Kraków. He was not a relative of mine, because my Sterns were in Odessa, and those who hadn’t emigrated much earlier were making revolution in the underground, yet one war later there were no rescue missions for them in Odessa and no more lists. Should I put this Stern onto my list anyway, because the others can’t be tracked down? Or would that be attempted theft?

There are, as is well known, games without winners.

Hello, my name is Joe, and I work in a button factory.

One day my boss came up to me and asked if I was busy.

I said no.

So he said:

Then push this button with your right hand.

Hello, my name is Joe …

THE RECIPE

The revelation that people left us struck me unawares; it settled over me like a shadow, covering my head like the basin that Don Quixote had used as a helmet and in which, centuries later, my blind babushka cooked plum preserves. Now the basin had been gathering dust on top of the cupboard for years.

When Lida, my mother’s older sister, passed away, I came to understand the meaning of the word history. My longing was fully developed, I was ready to submit myself to the windmills of memory, and then she died. I was standing there with bated breath, ready to ask, rooted to the spot, and if this had been a comic book, my speech bubble would have been empty. History begins when there are no more people to ask, only sources. I had no one left to question, no one who could still recall these times. All I had were fragments of memory, notes of dubious value, and documents in distant archives. Instead of asking questions at the right time, I had choked on the word history. Had Lida’s death brought me to adulthood? I was at the mercy of history.

The only thing I have from Aunt Lida is a recipe for a refreshing drink known as kvass. The recipe recently jumped out at me from a pile of unpaid bills, as though I owed something to Lida. After the war, Aunt Lidiya, or Lida, as we called her, was known as the classical beauty of the Kiev Pedagogical Institute, Lida from the Department of Defectology, as orthopedagogy is still called back home. Yet when I knew Lida, the same Lida who peered down at us serenely and unflappably from photographs, she was a shuffling creature in an apron who had said nothing for years, just served, one course after another, then into the kitchen and back again, on plates with a gilded rim. Eat! She had been the last one in the family to teach the deaf-mute children, she knew the secret, she knew patience, she cooked in silence, and now she was gone.

For a long time I couldn’t figure out what the EBP.KBAC at the very top of the slip of paper might signify. I stared at this EBP, thinking that the Cyrillic abbreviation could be understood as EBPопейский, YEVropeysky, European, or just as easily as EBPейский, JEWreysky, Jewish kvass—an innocent utopia of the Russian language and the Urbi et Orbi of my aunt, as though Europe and the Jews were descended from one root, and this recipe and this abbreviation fostered the refreshing hypothesis that all Jews, even those who were no longer Jews at all anymore, were among the last Europeans, having, after all, read everything that constitutes Europe. Or didn’t my aunt want to write out the word Jewish, because the incomplete and abbreviated form left open yet another interpretive option, for example, that this drink was not all that Jewish, but only allusively, only a little, in spite of the garlic?

The recipe turned out to be a kind of encrypted poetic exercise. I had never picked up on anything Jewish about my aunt, and there was nothing there anyway, aside from her penchant for cooking these dishes, which I couldn’t figure out until after her death, and I understood that she of all people, who wanted nothing to do with the whole pain of saying “Jew” and thinking of graves right away and who, because she was still alive, could not be a Jew, had learned a tasty, juicy set of recipes from her grandparents, who were still Jewish, and had adopted many things that even her mother didn’t know. Now gefilte fish, strudel, and chopped herring were part of Lida’s Ukrainian cooking repertoire.

INGREDIENTS:

One large bunch of lettuce

One large garlic bulb

One large bunch of dill

[One line is missing here]

You boil water and let it cool down to room temperature.

You rinse the lettuce, then you cut off the root and stem, then you cut everything into small pieces and peel the garlic.

This epistle was addressed to me. Who writes recipes in direct speech with a hint of pathos?

You should rinse and cut the dill

Then you stir everything and put it into a three-liter jar.

Had Lida been addressing me with this you, or people in general?

The three-liter jar, tryokhlitrovaya banka, rattled me even more. A generation of utensils lies between the kitchen over there, with its three-liter jar to store brine, its cheesecloth to strain the broth, its cast-iron pan, and my kitchen here. Where can you buy cheesecloth in Berlin? Over there we have little rags and worn-out towels and cheesecloth, copper basins and wooden spoons for the plum preserves, all of which had once been bought, and if you asked when, you were told, after the war.

She kept everything to herself, and when she died, all her strudels, gefilte fish, and sweet sausages with raisins went with her, her cookies, the ones with dried plums, the ones with honey, lemons, and nuts, and she also took the word tzimmes with her, as though everything had to remain a mystery. She kept everything to herself, her beauty as a young woman, all the reading she’d done, she kept it all inside, just for her husband, a war hero, felled by seven shots, one of the handsomest heroes, she said nothing about her illnesses and worries, her teaching methods, her increasing deafness, when she went in and out of the kitchen, she said nothing about the birthdays of the dead, the birthdays of the murdered, which she commemorated for years, alone, she also said nothing about other dates, she remembered everyone and everything that touched her in life, she said nothing about the war and the before and the after and all the trains and all the cities, the grief about her father, who survived the war, but did not return to the family and later lived next door, for years, in one of the nine-floor prefabricated buildings of our anonymous Soviet development. As she grew older and then old, she was still waiting, and eventually she turned mute, because she understood that she was going deaf, and so she returned to the deaf-mute children she had taught all her life, and if she could have, she would have kept her death to herself as well. I hadn’t asked her about anything and now wonder why I missed out on her so completely, her and her life, as though I had accepted her resolute deaf-muteness right from the start, her service and her role. What was I up to back then, anyway, when she could have given me everything, the recipe for EBP.KBAC, for example, to me and all of Eвропa?

PERPETUAL MOTION

Abstract thinking is not my forte, Uncle Vil, my father’s older brother, liked to quip, when I talked about friction losses. To test me, he gave me the most ingenious problems to solve when he visited, problems about Egyptian triangles, the model of perpetual motion, as though a fundamental truth would be revealed to me if I found solutions to Vil’s problems. But I never did.

He himself was the product of a Soviet metempsychosis, a transmutation of the energies between state, soul, and machine, the perpetual motion of my country. Vil was born in 1924, eight months after Lenin’s death, when the country was expressing its grief by naming factories, cities, and villages after him. Lenin lived, his name made power plant turbines revolve, your name shall be Lenin, and the lightbulbs glow. Hence my grandparents named their firstborn Vil, after the late Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was considered the grandfather of all Soviet children, so Lenin had grandchildren, albeit no children. Even fifty years later, we were his grandchildren, and we said Dedushka Lenin, Grandpa Lenin, because everything was in motion but time.

There were all kinds of marvelous creatures, such as Rabfak, Oblmortrest, Komsomol, Molokokoopsoyuz; everything was abbreviated and compounded back then, Mosselprom, Narkompros, or Cheka, the most long-lived organization, which later turned into GPU, NKVD, KGB, FSB. I knew a Ninel, a name formed by spelling Lenin backward; a Rem, a son of Trotskyites, from Revolutsiya Mirovaya—World Revolution; a Roi, from Revolution October International; and I even knew a very nice Stalina.

Maybe the choice of name also had to do with the fact that my grandparents could still speak Yiddish: the Yiddish force of will—vil—shone through, and, in fact, no one in our family was as single-mindedly determined as Vil, who never stopped optimizing his efficiency, and even the authorities went along with him. In 1940, when he applied for a passport in Kiev at the age of sixteen, he got a document with a statement on the fifth line that he was Russian even though his parents were Jewish and had the corresponding note in their passports. With his blond mop of hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, and narrow hips, Vil looked like the valiant Ivan from the fairy tale. It remains a mystery what mathematical operation could have led a Jewish couple to produce a Russian child, not even at birth, but at a passport agency. As a result, Vilya, as we called him, became a full-fledged Russian and shed the weight of his Jewish background, which receded to a mere detail, a superfluous add-on that was better left unmentioned. Besides, there was no cause to look back; there was only the future, for the world is vast, and knowledge infinite.

Vil’s little brother, my father Miron, born eight years later, carried on his grandfather’s name, Meir, in a modified form, and had the word Jew in his passport. However, for him there was no more Jewishness, so Miron also became a Russian, citizen of a nation of readers. He looked back at his ancestry pensively and with respect, if also a bit bewildered as to what he had to do with it.

The entire Soviet Union was against the force of gravity and dreamed of flying; Vil wanted to build airplanes. Even his body was aerodynamic, small and agile enough to go through life without friction losses. Vil could have stepped right out of the Soviet air force hymn everyone sang back then: We were born to make fairy tales real, to overcome space and expanse, we received steel arm-wings from Reason, our heart is an engine in flames. My heart beat faster and higher when I heard this hymn, fifty years later, especially the rising melody, Ever higher and higher and higher the flight of our metal birds steers, each of our propellers respires the tranquility of our frontiers.

At the age of eighteen Vil went to the front, like his entire class. They were packed into uniforms and sent off without the slightest notion of war, only of heroism. No sooner were they on the front in Mozdok in the Caucasus than the recruits charged into an antitank ditch under crossfire. When they had filled the ditch with their bodies, the tanks rolled over them. Vilya never told his parents exactly what had happened there at Mozdok; the only one to know was his brother Miron, who was eleven at the time. Miron retained this knowledge forever, maybe on behalf of his brother.

When the ditch was searched for survivors, Vil was found way at the bottom, squashed and shot through the groin. A miracle that there had even been a search, my father said.

Vil had severe contusions and traumatic epilepsy, and spent months in hospitals. He found his family in Ashgabat, thousands of miles from the Caucasus. Now a disabled war veteran, he was not beaten down by his injuries; instead, he used them as a motivating force and at the tender age of nineteen became the chairman of the Sports and Conscription Committee of Turkmenistan, the youngest minister in the Soviet Union.

He interrupted his university studies several times when epileptic seizures resulted in weeks of exhaustion. His tongue had to be held to prevent choking; my father kept talking about this tongue he had to hold, and every time he was surprised at his own words. How could Vilya still believe in Soviet power after the antitank ditch? I asked my father, and my father said that no one with doubts survived.

Eventually Vil studied mechanics and mathematics in Leningrad, exchanged air for water, and became a specialist in hydroacoustics. He had to solve the same problems as he had faced with flight, but resistance is stronger in water. Vilya optimized submarines so that the crew could hear everything without being heard, friction was avoided, and secrets kept.

He worked, worked, and worked on his own joyful wisdom, exploring the sound field and its inherent processes and the hydrodynamic problems of turbulence noise and the nonstationary functions of hydroacoustics. He even applied his sense of humor to his dialectical thinking, to his perpetuum mobile. In the name of our peace he worked for the war, but he himself spoke of maintaining equilibrium between forces, as though this was also just a question of mechanics.

Like Vil, I was born as a part of the state’s metabolic cycle, a hundred years after Lenin. I celebrated my birthdays together with Lenin, minus a hundred. I knew this would always help me to find my coordinates in the history of the world, but the vitality of the up-and-coming young state that was given to my uncle by birth had long since withered away. When I seemed doomed not to come up with solutions to his perpetuum mobile problems, I sensed how alien we were to each other. My uncle knew that I would never solve the problems he posed. If a solution were to be found for the perpetuum mobile, all disparities would be eliminated, as would questions of proximity, warmth, doubt, and possibly even kinship, because in Vil’s problems, everything human was regarded as a friction loss, as an obstacle to the incessant motion of hidden energies, my uncle’s dream. Maybe Vilya wasn’t joking at all—Abstract thinking isn’t your forte!—when he left the research field of friction losses to me, in his stead.

NEIGHBORS

I spent a large part of my childhood in Kiev in a new fourteen-floor apartment house on the left bank of the Dnieper, in a neighborhood that developed after the war and seemed to have no past, only a tidy future. But “no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten,” as the poet Olga Bergholz wrote in remembrance of the one million casualties of the Siege of Leningrad. This line was borne in the heart, and replaced memory throughout the land. There was no escaping it since it assumed the role of prophecy, with its revealed truth and concealed lies; we were called on to forget no one and nothing in order that we forget who or what was forgotten. Our backyard games extended beyond jump rope and dodge ball to endless rounds of a cops-and-robbers-like game of “us” against “the fascists,” thirty-five years after the war.

My street was named Ulitsa Florentsii, in honor of our beautiful Italian sister city. We were fortunate to live there because our address conveyed the beauty of Italy and our connection to the world of beauty, meaning that we too could be beautiful, that we too were raised in the spirit of the Renaissance to experience a rebirth and be situated in the center of the universe, albeit behind the Iron Curtain. The ceremonial opening of Ulitsa Florentsii took place in 1975, and a plaque was attached to our building. The building belonged to a Soviet ministry, so we called it Sovmin House, and in comparison with the nine-story prefabricated buildings in the Soviet barracks style that surrounded our courtyard, our Sovmin house was a luxury in brick. However, no ministers actually lived here; the residents were civil servants of the state apparatus, middle managers, low-ranking supervisors, teachers with well-worn book collections, cleaning ladies, cooks, secretaries, electricians, engineers. We never found out what we had done to merit an apartment in this socialist paradise—four rooms with built-in closets, an alcove for the refrigerator, two loggias, and attic space. In the first weeks after we moved in, my father met in the elevator a KGB case officer who had interrogated him ten years earlier, and he came home with a variant of “My home is my castle.” My home is their castle, he said.

Later on, the families of the American consulate staff moved in, and once, on July 4, they ran up a big American flag on their balconies, as though they had conquered our castle. In 1977, when the flamboyant and boisterous Florence soccer team came to Kiev, our street had a second ceremonial opening, although we had been living there for a long time. The Italians were surprised to discover us in our Kievan Florence, as though we were Native Americans being discovered by Europeans. What a piece of news that people live here! The plaque was taken down from one side of our building and attached to the other.

The building was full of women who had moved from villages to the city in their youth. As they grew older, they began to forget their hastily learned and never fully rooted Russian and sank back into the embraces of their warm Ukrainian. When they retired, they pulled out their floral headscarves, with the knot facing forward, and looked so rustic that it was hard to imagine that they’d ever taken them off. They gathered downstairs on the bench in front of the fourteen-floor colossus, shelled sunflower seeds, and exchanged the latest gossip. One of the few elderly men who lived in our building—the men died decades before the women—sat on the balcony somewhere quite high up and played folk songs on the accordion that resounded mournfully across our monumental courtyard and accompanied us as we went our various ways.

I knew very few of the neighbors, and even they were just passing acquaintances. One couple, a charming woman and her husband, a military doctor, always moved with grace and dignity. We did not know quite what to make of their daughter, and we never approached her; we knew nothing back then about Down syndrome. In those days, no one kept such a child at home—maybe it was even prohibited—but the other residents, held back by timidity and admiration of the family, never indulged in idle gossip. My mother told me that the beautiful woman was an orphan from the Spanish Civil War who had been brought to the allied Soviet Union in the late 1930s.

I got to know two other neighbors, both of whom were born during the war year of 1941: Sergey, a war orphan from Ossetia, and Vadim, who was raised by partisans in Polesie. In the other wing lived Boris, a talkative man of an indeterminate age, always cheerful and forthcoming, the only one who had crawled out of the mass grave in a small Jewish town in 1941 when all other residents, from young to old, were murdered. Only much later did I find out that the uncanny monster that we girls in the courtyard between the long rows of high-rises had always feared—we called him The Madman—was the son of the fragile Boris, and maybe the final offspring of the vanished Jewish town.

Sometimes letters were addressed to us at Venice Street, Ulitsa Venetsii. Our building was situated on a canal, which not all letter writers knew. The letters arrived, because there was no Ulitsa Venetsii in Kiev, and so we were responsible for all of Italy. Because of this Venice, water came pouring into my dreams and flooded everything in them, but rescue always arrived when the water had risen as far as my seventh floor, always in the form of a golden gondola from a misty distance that came for me alone. I gave no thought to the neighbors drowning below me, forgetting them in my dreams.

Three floors below us there lived the lonely Makarovna, an elderly Ukrainian villager who had survived collectivization as a child only to lose her parents and fiancé in the war. For years she sat on the bench in front of our building in slippers and a headscarf. She was the feistiest of all, the brashest and unhappiest, always tipsy, sometimes amusing but never cheerful, and she gave us children candy so old it seemed to have dated back to the war provisions of last resort. In her bright yellow headscarf with shiny flowers in maroon and green, in her dark blue dressing gown—the retired woman’s uniform—and a look of intensity in her faintly bulging eyes, she struck me as one of the last of the strong, wild, beautiful people that had once settled here at the threshold of the Ukrainian steppe. Later she gave me all kinds of superfluous things, felt boots for infants or thickly embroidered handkerchiefs, which I have kept to this day; she gave things away because she needed money, but I didn’t understand that back then. From time to time she recounted jumbled bits and pieces about the war, family members who had died, and the collective farms known as kolkhozy, but either I hadn’t been paying enough attention or her delirium was making her mix up the Soviet catastrophes; in any case the years did not match up. In some accounts her family died in the war, but in others the family starved on the kolkhoz, and her fiancé had never come back, or had never existed, as I secretly feared. The war was to blame, that was the only part that was certain.

IN THE MUSEUM

I wanted to go back up and look at the bicorne that Napoleon lost at Waterloo, but my daughter dragged me down to the ground floor for the twentieth century. I sought to distract her with Dürer and Luther, but in vain; she brought me to the 1920s, where we raced through the strikes, the hunger, and Berlin’s golden age, for she wanted to go on, to go there, and as we neared the 1930s, I tensed up. She pulled me along to join up with a tour for adults; Let’s not, I said, but she reassured me, I know the score, Mama, and her comfort with the subject discomfited me more than her knowledge. She was eleven. We strode through the seizure of power, the ban on forming associations, the persecution of Communists, and when we were standing in front of the chart with the Nuremberg Laws and the tour guide—the Führerin, funny that’s the word for the woman doing this job, she was just in the middle of talking about the Führer—launched into an explanation of who, and what percent, my daughter asked me in a loud whisper, Where are we here? Where are we on this chart, Mama? The question really ought to be asked not in the present tense but in the past, and the subjunctive: where would we have been if we had lived then, if we had lived in this country—if we had been Jewish and had lived here back then. I know this lack of respect for grammar, and I, too, ask myself questions of this sort, where am I on this picture, questions that shift me from the realm of imagination into reality, because avoidance of the subjunctive turns imagination into recognition or even statement, you take another’s place, catapult yourself there, into this chart, for example, and thus I try out every role on myself as though there was no past without an if, as though, or in that case.

Where are we on this chart, Mama? my daughter asked. I was frightened by her directness, and to protect her from being frightened, I hastened to reassure her that we were not on it at all, we would have been in Kiev by that point or already evacuated, and by the way we weren’t even born yet, this chart has nothing to do with us, and now I had almost said if, but, and as though after all, when a man from the guided group turned to me and said, By the way, we have paid.

Even before I understood that he was telling me that the guided tour was not free of charge and that he thought that I too should pay or we would be freeloaders, my daughter and I, as though we had filched this eight-euro history, although, thanks anyway, I would not filch this kind of thing, so before I understood that without paying we had no right to stand in front of the chart or on it, that we had come to the paying circle too late; even before or as I thought all of that, tears came to my eyes, although I wasn’t crying at all, something was crying in me, I was cried for, and also the man was cried for within me, although he had no need of it, because he was in the right, we hadn’t paid, or rather, we actually had, but there is always someone who hasn’t.

CHAPTER 2
ROSA AND THE MUTE CHILDREN

SHIMON THE HEARER

He who does not find himself finds that his family will swallow him whole.

—ANCIENT CHINESE PROVERB

Seven generations, said my mother, two hundred years long we have taught deaf-mute children how to speak; my mother always said “we,” although she herself never taught deaf-mute children, she taught history. Surely she couldn’t think that teaching deaf-mutes and teaching history were one and the same profession. The way she described it, we would forever remain captive in this selfless dedication, and even future generations would not be free of the responsibility of the We, the responsibility of teaching others, of living for others, especially for their children. These seven generations sound like the stuff of a fairy tale, as though seven generations were enough to reach eternity, to attain the word.

We have always taught, my mother said, we have all been teachers, and there is no other path for us. She said it with such conviction that it sounded like one of those adages that our country thought tried and true, like “A voice cries in the desert,” or “A prophet is without honor in his own country.”

Her sister, her mother, her grandfather, and all her grandfather’s brothers and sisters, his father, and his father’s father taught deaf-mute children; they founded schools and orphanages and lived under one roof with these children, they shared everything with them. These altruists drew no distinction between their job and their life. My mother loved the word altruist; they were all altruists, she said, and she was sure that she, too, carried this altruistic heritage within her, but I was equally certain that I did not.

When my mother told me how our ancestors spread out across Europe and founded schools for deaf-mutes in Austria-Hungary, in France and Poland, I recalled the passage in the Old Testament, or so I thought, but it was actually in the New Testament: Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob. Jacob begat Judah and his brothers. Judah begat Perez and Zerah with Tamar—and more unfamiliar names. I knew this passage as vaguely as my own genealogy, but it seemed to me that our set of ancestors had no end either. One generation after the other, beyond our line of vision and beyond the horizon of family memory, taught speaking to the deaf-mutes. Do you hear their fervid whispering?

Sh’ma Yisrael, in the morning and the evening, Sh’ma Yisrael, Hear, O Israel, hear me!

The first ancestor we knew by name was Shimon Heller, Simon Geller in Russian. Maybe he was following the call of his Hebrew name; Shimon means “he has heard, the one who has heard from God and is heard by him.” The first disciple who heeded and followed Jesus was named Simon, I thought, although this story had no meaning for my Jewish relatives. My Shimon founded a school for deaf-mute children in Vienna, during the first half of the nineteenth century. He taught children how to speak so that they would be heard; otherwise his brothers in the faith would regard them as mentally ill, because the faculties of understanding and reason, they thought back then, reside in spoken language. To be heard is to belong.

Sound by sound, word by word, day by day, they learned to pray. I had grown up in the family of the Soviet Union sister nations; all were alike, and all had to learn my native tongue, but none had to learn prayers. All belonged to our We. I proudly believed that my ancestors taught the orphans of all nations. For an unacceptably long period of time, I couldn’t imagine what language my relatives spoke back then, what language they taught the children. My cosmopolitan present made me think they had taught the deaf-mute children to speak in all the languages of the world, as though deaf-muteness and orphanhood made for a blank page and the freedom to adopt any language and any history. As I saw it, our Jewishness was deaf-mute, and deaf-muteness was Jewish. This was my history and my heritage, yet it was not me.

Sh’ma Yisrael, hear me Israel, where is Israel?

I sifted through stacks of documents, looking for evidence of us in the old papers and on the Internet. The search command highlighted the word deaf in yellow, as though Google knew that yellow was the color of Jewishness, just as I knew that Google highlighted any searched term in bright yellow. Every story with the yellow deaf became a building block of my past, of my Internet Jewishness. Maybe my people had stepped right out of the Talmud, out of the story of the two deaf-mutes who lived near the rabbi and always followed him into the school where he taught, and sat next to him, observing him attentively and moving their lips along with him. The rabbi prayed for them, and at some point it became apparent that they knew everything the rabbi had taught his students; they had learned everything with their eyes. I tried to follow up on all the other stories with the yellow deaf, reading the passages surrounding the yellow highlightings and expecting these deaf stories to flutter up and take on a life of their own.

At the beginning of the history of my family stood a translation. In 1864, the writer and proponent of Jewish Enlightenment Faivel Goldschmidt wrote an article about Simon Geller and his school in a Lemberg-issued Hebrew newspaper, full of enthusiasm about Simon’s personality and his work. Sixty years later, the text was translated into Russian by Simon’s grandson, Ozjel Krzewin, and another sixty years after that, my mother discovered Ozjel’s translation in an archive in Kiev, together with other documents about my relatives’ schools. However, the Hebrew newspaper with Goldschmidt’s article was no longer traceable. Our family’s heritage is predicated on a questionable translation without a source text, and I am now telling the story of this family in German without there ever having been a Russian original.

My mother said, Always with the pencil, they all learned with the pencil, the point in the mouth of the teacher, the end in the mouth of the child. That wasn’t in Goldschmidt’s article, but my mother knew it. She told me about the pencil, amused by the simple trick, yet somewhat put off by how close the mouths came to each other. The pencil vibrated, and the children noticed how the language originates out of the tongue.

“For every illness, even the most severe, the Lord God sends healing,” Ozjel Krzewin translated the article about his grandfather, as though the latter had been a Jewish holy man. After two years the children could read and write Hebrew and German, and they could read lips fluently. After five years, the article went on to say, Geller’s pupils could speak so clearly that their speech barely differed from those who had been endowed with hearing. They set their heavy tongues in motion and lifted off their vocal burdens. Their prophet Moses had also had an unwieldy mouth and a heavy tongue.

When Shimon was still in Vienna, an adult came into his school. The man’s father had died, but he could not pray, because he was deaf-mute. He wanted to learn to pray in spoken language, and when he was able to, he went to the cemetery to the grave of his father, who had died many years earlier, to say kaddish. Even newspapers reported on this.

Ozjel appended his own name, Krzewin, to the name Geller in the translation. Did he want to highlight the relationship, or was the word already in the original text, an added name that Simon had earned? One Polish friend tells me that people named Krzewin are disseminators of knowledge; another says that krzew means “bush”: maybe your Krzewins planted trees. But the Jews had no land, I thought, they planted their trees in the air. I liked the idea that even the name of my ancestors was evidence of this exuberant urge to learn. I leafed through The History of Judaism, six volumes, The History of the Eastern European Jewry, two volumes, The History of the Jews, one volume. I walked back and forth at the Judaica shelves of the library.

I did not find a Simon Geller in the many thick books about Vienna and its institutions for the deaf and mute. The definitive text on the subject, The General Austrian Israelite Deaf-Mute Institute in Vienna, 1844–1926, had a Simon Heller for the time period of our Heller or Geller, but he was the director of an institute for the blind. That has to be him, said the lady in the archive; in the small world of pedagogy for disabled students there can only have been one Simon Heller.

The school started in Vienna, then made its way through rural Polish areas, through Galicia, like a traveling circus, staying briefly in a city, a town, a shtetl, before Simon moved on with his family, the orphans, and the children who were sent by their parents.

I peered inside and listened, thinking of the many selfless men of the Jewish Enlightenment who were inspired by the idea that to spread learning is to pass it from mouth to mouth. For these people, who were obsessed with hearing, the spoken language was everything. I gesticulated, called out, opened my lips, I tried saying Sh’ma Yisrael, again and again, Sh’ma Yisrael, as though I had never spoken, I shook the air, Sh’ma Yisrael, I wanted so much to be heard, putting my tongue and my language to the test, I tried to tell the stories, to render them in my foreign German, I told the stories, one after the other, but I did not myself hear what I was saying.

A FLIGHT

When Shimon, the teacher, returned from a fund-raising trip and strode along the town’s weather-beaten buildings, I did not let him out of my sight. God lived in these side streets: Poland, Polyń, Polonia, Polania, po-lan-ya, here-lives-God, three Hebrew words that made a Promised Land for the Jews out of the Slavic Poland, and they all lived here, driven by language. I did not let him out of my sight while he was running through the narrow streets to his children, and then, behind the next corner, he took off from the earth and flew through the starlit sky over the little town. Why not fly, what with all the worries in the world, fly, besotted and wistful, so many children, one’s own and the orphans, like stars in the sky, like six hundred thirteen commandments, you can’t count higher than that on one walk, I’ve tried to, they fly toward tomorrow, parallel to time and space, sometimes crosswise, following their own trajectory and the wise and stern books that we will never read and understand, the paths in the towns shimmer, dark green, my evening stroll, my hunt for Shimon, the teacher, who stuffs small, colorful glass balls from Vienna into the pockets of his black overcoat, which is darker than the night, sucking candy from Lemberg, a tad tart, because a tongue needs to carry a tang, and he always has a pencil with him, a kościół, a church, a jug, a candlestick, chase after him, a whirlwind in the sky full of flying objects, another church with bulbous copper spires and a sloping golden cross, then a fiddle and blue flower of a boy with big, long-lashed eyes, taking a few more turns over the earth of their beloved Polania, their Promised Land of Polonia, the house of God, and it is here that the story of a family, of kin, can begin, and maybe even this story.

THE GATE

My first trip abroad, in the summer of 1989, took me to Poland. The country was aquiver with shock therapy, the term attached to the economic experiment that lifted price controls. We had only six days, one of them for Oświęcim. I remember looking out the window at the flat countryside, which seemed familiar, as though I hadn’t gone away at all, with its gentle hills and long plain, unobtrusive vegetation, and slightly faded colors. I remember my fellow passengers in the bus, conversations about a music festival in Kraków, and a little shop at the entrance to Oświęcim, full of objects that had nothing to do with the memorial site, cheaply priced silver, necklaces, rings, crosses, maybe other items I am no longer seeing clearly now. Everyone who had already been in Poland had brought back silver. “Buy silver!” was the motto of the day. It’s easy to acquire a taste for these shops, and some of the ladies in the bus had brought irons and hair curlers to sell at a profit here in Poland. I remember my growing desire to buy something, anything, a simple chain necklace, for instance, although I really didn’t need one, while struggling with feelings of shame to be thinking about money and profit here at this gate; after all, I was from a good family, which in our case meant that we reined in our yen for profit, which wasn’t hard for us to do, since we had no money, and this conferred dignity on us and confirmed our sense of decency. But a new era had dawned, and our moral norms, which were carved out for eternity, no longer applied. If I didn’t buy the necklace, I would surely come to regret passing up the opportunity to join in and be part of the group, to be one of the people who could buy because there was finally something to buy, and if everyone did it, it was surely a good investment. Investment was one of those brand-new words, so it couldn’t be so bad to buy a silver chain here, at the entrance to Oświęcim, Auschwitz. That was not an immoral deed; it was in keeping with the times to be able to afford something mundane, as a sign of the victory over fascism, for instance. Still, the more I tried to convince myself of that, the more I felt torn apart and overcome with the feeling that pragmatism was inappropriate here. I think I recall holding my breath and opting for a compromise by buying three such chains as presents, as though their being presents jettisoned the question of good and evil. One for Mama, one for my best friend, and one just in case. I wound up keeping the last one for myself until a kind of unease impelled me to lose it; part of me must have wanted to let it go, yet I had a tinge of regret. Even Karl Marx wrote about the chains you lose on the path to freedom.

Once I’d purchased my three chains and was standing at the gate to Oświęcim, my memory ground to a halt. From this moment on, I do not recall anything. I have tried again and again to make my memory slip through the gate, just to have a look around, but it does not work. I was there, but didn’t retain any sense of what I experienced, and I didn’t reemerge until the next day, when we came to a lovely small town in the south of Poland, with a picturesque marketplace and kościół, a newly built, starkly modern church. I regained my composure at the sight of the young priest, whom I regarded as a creature unknown to me and all of science, as though he was the first person I had ever seen, as though I had just emerged from his rib, and as though he could not know that I belonged to his postdiluvian species. I beheld his sharp nostrils, his eyes, with their fan-like lashes, gazing upward to the Virgin Mary, his hands with their long, exaggeratedly decorous fingers, as though seeing everything human, the sum total of anatomy, for the very first time, though for some reason known only to God he was covered up by the cassock, and when he told us in a soft, impassioned voice about his new congregation, I couldn’t concentrate on his concerns, so beautiful he was, beyond all measure. Had I been capable of concentration, I would have had to let in my memory of yesterday, the word itself and what it stands for, how to concentrate people and oneself; instead something within me asked what celibacy and the will of God are about, if I am so attracted to him. I clearly remember having a firm belief in God at the very moment when I was confusing beauty with desire, a belief made possible by my having forgotten something, but I did not know what exactly.

My fellow passengers from Kiev (then considered Russians in Poland) were now adorned and equipped with all manner of silver, and uncharacteristically quiet. There was no chatter or chitchat, but I heard sensible questions about God, Communists, and economic reform. Their solemnity showed that they had not entirely awakened from their nightmare; its spectral images were still galloping on long thin legs in front of their eyes.

Of course I know that we must have gone through this gate, I know what is written on this gate, the way I know what two plus two is, how “Frère Jacques” goes, or the Lord’s Prayer, although I don’t know that one well. I know well enough what the gate says and that I hate work so much because of it, even the word, Arbeit, which will never, with any coin or poem, buy its freedom from this verse, this curse, and that is why I just can’t find any outlook on work, because I always wonder where this Arbeit will take me, for it’s true what it says about freedom here, and there is no solution to that. I know how the paths run, I know what there is to see, what I could have seen there, because I saw the barracks, the containers like those for wholesale goods, and the entire site several times later, often enough to emblazon the place in my memory, but I recall nothing from that particular day.

I have tried to paste later impressions over this amnesia, which seemed to me like a thick pane of frosted glass, but nothing stayed in place, everything vanished like last year’s foliage, and I saw only a golden autumn day with a mixed woodland at the edge of a painting.

ARIADNE’S THREAD

Many years have gone by since my babushka Rosa died, but I still keep finding her hairpins, the black Soviet hairpins made of some flexible metal I can’t put a name to, which have disappeared from the market with the collapse of the Soviet empire; maybe the raw material was produced in one of our republics, but the pins themselves in another one and then packaged somewhere in Asia, only to be transported back to the center, because everything was manufactured according to planned economic capriciousness. I find Rosa’s hairpins in all cities of the world, in hotels, at modern train stations, in train corridors, and in the apartments of strangers, as though Rosa had been there shortly before me, as though she knew that I had lost my way and was showing me how to get home with her hairpins—even though she had never traveled abroad.

During the last years of her life, Rosa wrote her memoirs incessantly and in great haste, in pencil on white paper. The paper quickly turned yellow, as though anticipating its natural aging process, but Rosa’s loss of sight was quicker. She didn’t number the pages; she simply piled them up. Did she sense that there was no point in putting them in order if the individual lines couldn’t be made out anyway? She often forgot to move on to a new sheet and wrote several pages’ worth on the same piece of paper. One line ran into the next, and another one lay atop earlier writing like waves of sand on the beach, obeying a force of nature, tangled up in the interlaced and interwoven pencil scribblings.

Rosa fought off her blindness with her scrawl, lacing together the lines of her world as it slipped away. The darker it grew, the more densely she squeezed her writing onto the pages. Some passages were as inextricably intertwined as matted wool; the prices of potatoes in the late 1980s were knotted together with tales from the war and fleeting encounters. Here and there a recognizable word would seep through the woolen thicket: ailing, Moscow, lifeblood. For years, I thought that the texts could be deciphered—in America there are devices that can unscramble lines like these—until I understood that Rosa’s writings were not intended for reading, but rather for holding on to, a thickly woven, unbreakable Ariadne’s thread.

She sat in our apartment building on Ulitsa Florentsii, using the windowsill as a table. She saw as little outside as inside, and she wrote.

The only things I still write by hand are telephone numbers, which I enter into a small telephone book decorated with Leonardo da Vinci’s handwriting. I bought it years ago in Florence, and whenever I look at Leonardo’s refined flourishes, the mark of an era in which people still believed that man was the measure of all things, I always think of Babushka’s illegible pencil scribblings.

Rosa’s hands, which were always animated by her use of sign language, didn’t rest even in retirement. She wanted to cook but wasn’t able to, because she couldn’t see, and her hands now adhered to different principles. She had spent her entire life with the deaf, she spoke sign language every day, her students called Rosa Mi-ni-a-tur-na-ya-mi-mi-ka, miniature mimic, as though that was her name, as though they had counted the syllables of her full name Ro-sa-li-ya-A-si-li-yev-na, translated them into sign language, and then back into spoken language, so that we could understand it as well. An elderly teacher from Rosa’s school told me that she had the most beautiful yet bashful signs and gestures of all the hearing members of that community.

When I knew Rosa, she was almost blind. She could hardly make out shapes, and when I came into the room, she took me for my father or my brother. Never for my mother, her daughter, because my mother was seldom at home. Rosa had joined an association for the blind, and now she went throughout the city bringing other blind people food rations that were distributed by the association: a scrawny blue chicken, a bag of buckwheat, some condensed milk, and a can of sprats. For a long time I failed to understand why she was helping other people who in many cases were not nearly as blind as she, and no one helped her.

Once I watched her crossing the street, unable to see the traffic lights and cars, yet she had her eye on the secret destination that the other pedestrians were oblivious to, the blind and their food packages. She rushed out onto the road as though taking the stage. Before I could cry out, she was already in the middle of an incessant stream of traffic. The cars slowed down, as though guided to a gentle stop by an invisible hand, no sound of screeching, as though we had briefly relocated to the world of the deaf. Rosa clearly had angels watching over her. How she found the stops, numbers, addresses, entryways, floors, apartments, and people remains a mystery to me to this day.

Rosa was independent and stubborn. She never let anyone help her—it did not even occur to her that she might need help. She secretly saved up money for her own burial, the way many old people do to avoid being a burden to others, even after their deaths. Then came perestroika, prices shot up like the giants in our fairy tales, and Rosa’s savings were wiped out.

Each time the hand of some gauge, unknown to us, struck a certain hour, Babushka headed down to the bakery. She bought a quarter loaf of bread and hid it under her pillow. That’s how to outwit death: get hold of a crust of bread, and death can’t catch you. The older she got, the deeper she sank back into the war. My mother was horrified every time she found one of these partial loaves, the expression of a widespread war syndrome without a known remedy.

I remember Babushka spending hours in front of the television, off to the left side, close to the screen, without glasses, because glasses no longer helped. Her profile was projected onto the flickering black-and-white image on the set. I never watched TV without her, and even years later, whenever I watch a program or go to the movies, I envision her silhouette, as though I fused it onto my optic nerve long in the past. She sang along to “The Internationale” in front of the television, No higher being will save us / No God, no kaiser, no tribune. / To wrest us from our misery / We alone must do it soon!

In Russian we were even more united in our misery, she firmly believed, and I believe her to this day.

As cumbersome as her increasing blindness made everyday life, it seemed to bestow a mark of honor that spared Rosa from deafness. Her sense of hearing grew keener and more refined, to the point that she heard voices that had faded away long ago. The less she could see, the more she sang the world of her youth back into life.

Rosa wanted to become an opera singer or to work at the operetta. She loved to dance, and as a young woman she often stole out of the house and away from the family’s altruistic deaf-mute work to go to the operetta all on her own. She became a speech therapist and teacher of the hearing-impaired, dancing and singing for her students whenever she could. At the age of seventy-five, she still entertained me with her favorites: Der Zigeunerbaron, Die Fledermaus, Die Bajadere, and, above all, Verdi.

Why am I guilty for falling in love with Alfredo, she sang, in the odd Russian translation of “L’amore d’Alfredo perfino mi manca.” Years later I found out that this was Violetta’s aria from La Traviata. I was taken aback every time; Rosa sang so passionately, and this passion of my babushka, who had lived without a man for forty years, seemed so strange to me, and so palpable. Rosa knew dozens of Italian arias in Russian; she accompanied herself, singing and playing blind on the black piano, which stood in my room.

Rosa and her older daughter, Lida, had taught deaf-mute children; my mother and I no longer did, yet we retained the gestures, the motions of our hands. We worked our hands while speaking, as though our spoken language was itself nothing to speak of and incomplete without this accompaniment. Raising one hand or the other, folding our fingers together, small discordant movements without purpose or aim, at odds with themselves, stringing up ornaments in the air, we descendants accompanied ourselves with gestures. No one—not even we ourselves—understood the chords we were creating. We no longer played the piano, and little by little we unlearned the language of our hands and fumbled in the void.

When Rosa was old and no longer taught—I never saw her communicating with anyone in sign language—she would make beautiful movements, for no particular reason, at the dinner table on Ulitsa Florentsii, as though she was actually from Italy, and she continued these movements while wielding her knife and fork, often resulting in cutlery falling on the floor and knives flying through the air. Where others inherited silver cutlery, we inherited clumsiness in handling utensils of stainless steel. When Aunt Lida, Rosa’s daughter, stopped working at the school for the deaf-mute, she took up smoking, and reined in her flailing hands with a cigarette and match. In. Out. Relax! Lida’s daughter, Marina, was always knitting, not the motions of knitting in the air, like the deaf and their teachers, but sweaters, socks, skirts. She knitted everything, even bikinis, while I sat empty-handed over the computer keyboard.

But the most important thing about Rosa was her legs, my mother said. Rosa was proud of her legs, and it must be said that of all the women in our family, she had the loveliest. My babushka’s legs were exquisite. She was fleet-footed, even in the hospital shortly before her death, and showed the nurses how to do the Charleston when they came to air out the room and Rosa had to get up despite her pain—she was only able to lie flat or dance. My mother was visiting and watched her mother dance; Rosa had been strictly forbidden to dance after her heart attack, and everyone knew that. My mother told me that Rosa gave a speech in front of all the patients, talking about the 1920s in Moscow and how she learned to dance, and while dancing she chatted about the New Economic Policy and how she had been present at Trotsky’s speech in Molokokoopsoyuz, the Milk Cooperative Association, and how he had brought a cow onto the stage, well, maybe he wasn’t the one to do it, my mother mused, but someone else, while Trotsky gave his speech, and I supposed that the Charleston reminded Rosa of Trotsky and his cow as she deftly danced her way into world history.

The legs of the women in our family grew worse with every succeeding generation. They were literally degenerating, my mother said—and she meant it seriously, although she enjoyed joking around—because the women in our family had spent centuries standing in front of their students six days a week, their legs bowed and their feet flattened into swans’ feet, my mother said, evidently believing in both Darwin’s evolution and Ovid’s metamorphoses, and alarmed at what would become of me.

My grandfather Vasily can be seen in the photograph, a handsome man with a narrow face and finely chiseled features. He is leaning on his left knee; the table is covered with a heavy fringed cloth and a basket of roses. Rosa is dancing jauntily on the table, to something from a Kálmán operetta, “The beauty, the beauty, the beauty from the cabaret.” I cannot alter anything in this picture, just edge the roses to the side. This was a marriage proposal, we were told, a basket full of roses and Rosa, the speech therapist, on the table.

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